Interests and Research

2018 - 2019

Alumni stories

Arshy Azizi
Arshy's interests
are in Continental philosophy and aesthetics, poetry and politics. His research projects are Plato, Proust, and the relationship between love and truth. 

Alba Elliot
Alba's interests are Modernity, French surrealist poetry, feminism, contemporary French autobiographical writings. She is researching female surrealist poets in Europe (France, German, Spain).

Marcus Mamourian
His interests are science and literature (German and French), language and philosophy, and paranoia. His research projects are Rainald Goetz's punk novels and their relationship to economic imaginaries.

Yibea Qian
Her interests are English Literature, Literature of friendship, literature and philosophy, "world literature", East-West relationships.

Stephen Sudia
Stephen's interests are Latin American Literature, Borges, place and movement, utopias and heterotopias. He is researching the role of censorship in Russia and Cuba (Shklovsky and Cabrera Infante).  

Abdalla Taha
His interests are
20th Century Arabic Literature, Modernity and Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism and Islamic theology.  Abdalla's researching the meaning of modernity and its modernisms for 20th Arab philosophers and intellectuals (Laroui, Abdurrahman, Tarabishi, among others).

2017-2018

Alumni stories

Evan Strouss
Evan's interests are currently located in the poetics of the Italian, English, and German Baroque. His thesis is centered on Giambattista Marino's La strage degli innocenti, with a particular emphasis on poetic conceits of blood and wounds in conversation with biopolitical and affect theory.

Marcus Pyle
Marcus's research centers on issues of fin-de-siecle opera, depictions of femmes fatales, intersections of gender, sexuality, French critical theory (Derrida, Deleuze and Lacan), and African-American lives and music.

Mariana Candela Baptiste

Mariana's research interests lie on the intersection between Art History and Literary Studies. For her thesis, she is researching Aimée Humbert's 1870 travel account, Le Japon illutré, focusing on the depiction of prostitution through a study of text-image relations.

Meghan Collins
Meghan is interested in memoir and gender studies. She is currently writing a thesis on autobiographical comics, focusing on Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel and Faire semblant c'est mentir by Dominique Goblet. 

Michael Ramsey

Raiany Romanni
Raiany works on notions of gender in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and The Birth of Tragedy.

Tetiana Savchynski
Tetiana's topic deals with the issues of translation and the Cold War. More specifically, her research focuses on how Walter Arndt's translation of Pushkin's poem "The Gaboriliad", which was published in the "Playboy" magazine in 1974, made the poem into an item in Cold War traffic of texts. 

Varol Kahveci
Varol's research focuses on migration and identity. He is doing a comparative study between the German and French contexts with a focus on Meral Kureyshi's Elefanten im Garten and Tahar Ben Jelloun's Au Pays.

Yan Liu
Yan's research interests include post-colonialism, modernity and modern Chinese literature and history. With respect to his MA Essay, he focuses on western representations of the Chinese Civil War in the nineteenth century.

Yihong Zhu
Yihong works on Dickens and early 19th century London. She focuses on Walter Benjamin's work on the flaneur and the urban setting, with regards to the way Dickens develops his urban writing in early part of his career.